Maxine Waters intervened with regulators to protect personal investment
Waters also greased the skids with Treasury to get the bank a meeting it desired.
Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) intervened with regulators on behalf of a bank to which she had personal financial ties, the Wall Street Journal reports. Waters also greased the skids with Treasury to get the bank a meeting it desired. Waters and her husband own as much as $500,000 in OneUnited stock:
Ms. Waters and her husband have both held financial stakes in the bank. Until recently, her husband was a director. At the same time, Ms. Waters has publicly boosted OneUnited’s executives and criticized its government regulators during congressional hearings. Last fall, she helped secure the bank a meeting with Treasury officials.
Her involvement isn’t new. Ms. Waters has detailed her financial ties in a series of federal disclosure forms and has been vocal in public in support of the bank. Those ties, however, have received little public attention. Nor is it well known how the influential lawmaker has over the years acted to support the bank and its executives.
Such potential conflicts of interest are more serious as the banking system’s crisis has led the government to take an increasingly active role in overseeing financial institutions, including OneUnited. The financial-services committee on which Ms. Waters sits oversees banking issues, and the lawmaker is a potential future chairman.
During the presidential campaign just a few months ago, Democrats tried to paint McCain as corrupt by blowing his role in the Keating Five out of proportion. In fact, they made it sound as though McCain did essentially what Waters has done here, and screeched about corruption. Now that Waters has been shown to interfere with regulators to protect the personal financial interests of her family and her contributors (OneUnited has generated over $12,000 in donations to Waters), will these same Democrats take action against corruption — as they themselves defined it in the fall of 2008? Or are they more interested in culturing corruption?
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